Forty years ago on 26 February, something extraordinary happened to British comics. Newsagents’ shelves were suddenly stuffed with a brand new title, its masthead garish red and yellow, with an enticing plastic “Space Spinner” taped to the front. “In orbit every Saturday,” the front proclaimed, “for a low price: 8p Earth Money.” 2000AD had landed.

It’s not, strictly, correct to say the world had seen nothing like 2000AD before. A few months earlier, in October 1976, a title put out by the same publishers, IPC, had died an ignominious death. Action was stuffed to the gills with anti-authoritarianism, ultraviolence and gore. Hugely popular with kids, especially boys, it proved too unpalatable for the nation’s moral guardians. Questions were asked in the House, tabloids fulminated against its bloody violence.

Too much action: how kids' comic Action drowned in its own ultraviolence

Read more

The final issue of Action was pulped before it made it to the newsagents. But its successor was already in the works, from the writer/editor who had created Action: Pat Mills.

In Action, Mills had freely taken inspiration from 1970s popular culture, riffing on Muhammad Ali, Jaws and football hooligans. The new wave of science-fiction blockbusters – Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind – gave him a brainwave.

“I felt, in a way, that science fiction could escape the heavy flak we had got with Action,” says Mills, who now lives in Spain. “With Action, the message was loud and clear because most of it was set in what was the present time. With 2000AD, we could do the same sort of thing but if anyone complained we could say, ‘Look, it’s just some robots in the future.’”

Mills created an identity for 2000AD that immediately charmed readers: its fictional editor would be green-skinned alien Tharg the Mighty, who had come from his world circling the distant star of Betelgeuse to create “the Galaxy’s Greatest Comic”. The creators of each episodic comic strip would be “droids”, working hard in IPC’s London headquarters at King’s Reach Tower which, as every reader came to know and love, was Tharg’s spaceship.

Mills spent the year before 2000AD hit the stands thinking up and writing the opening lineup of stories. These included Harlem Heroes, an all-black sports team who played a futuristic airborne blend of basketball and football, obviously inspired by the movie Rollerball; Mach-1, a Six Million Dollar Man-style bionic hero; a revamped version of classic British stiff-upper-lip space hero Dan Dare; Flesh,in which time-travelling cowboys hunted dinosaurs to feed an overpopulated future society; and Invasion!, about the occupation of Britain by warlike Volgans from somewhere to the east, which played nicely into the growing fears of conflict with the Soviet Union.

Welcome to your future! ... from the first 2000AD. Photograph: Rebellion

On the toilet wall at his London offices, broadcaster and writer Jonathan Ross has a framed copy of that first issue – complete with Space Spinner – with the notice: In case of boredom, break glass. He picked up on eBay a few years ago. “I was 16 when the first comic came out,” Ross says. “I’d loved Action and was sad to see it go. 2000AD wasn’t like anything else around, it had a more European look to the artwork, and that seemed to give it more of a punk feel.

“I definitely remember it feeling a lot more countercultural than a lot of comics, and I bought it pretty solidly for the first four years. I kind of went away from it after that and then came back. For it to thrive for 40 years is a remarkable achievement.”

Ross fondly remembers strips such as ABC Warriors, about a platoon of robots, and Robo-Hunter, featuring Sam Slade, a Bogart-ish future PI who dealt with cases involving errant droids, plus strips written by a relative newcomer, Alan Moore, in the early 80s, Skizz and The Ballad of Halo Jones.

But what of Judge Dredd, surely 2000AD’s most famous character? He didn’t appear in the first issue, but made his debut in the second “prog”, as the weekly instalments became known.

Dredd is one of a cadre of judges who dispense instant justice in the sprawling, post-apocalyptic metropolis of Mega-City One, which comprises most of the eastern seaboard of a future America – but he might have been a very different beast, had Mills’s first concept taken hold.

“The story I had in mind was this sort of Hammer-Quatermass-Doctor Who idea,” he explains. “Where Judge Dredd would actually have been the last hanging judge in England who sees someone walking around that he knows he sentenced to death. It had elements of the occult and didn’t really fit in with 2000AD too well, then John Wagner [who wrote the first Judge Dredd stories] asked if he could have the name for this future policeman story we were trying to work up.”

Children lapped up Dredd, who was loosely based on Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, and though his policy of shoot first, ask questions later caused parents of more liberal leanings to blanch a little, it was clear this was was pure satire. As Jonathan Ross also points out: “The fact that Judge Dredd was set in the future made the violence just seem more acceptable, especially after the trouble Action had.”

Graham Linehan, creator of TV comedies including Father Ted and the IT Crowd, was another graduate from Action to 2000AD. “My dad was very upset by Action. He thought it was far too violent, but I absolutely loved it,” Linehan says. “Then when 2000AD came along, it was like a loophole because it was science fiction. It was transgressive, it was anti-authoritarian, but it was always thoughtful. With something like Judge Dredd, which started off as Clint’s Dirty Harry but in the future, 2000AD was really taking base materials and turning them into gold.”

Of special interest to Linehan, growing up in Dublin, was Slaine, which debuted in 1983: a barbarian drawn from Celtic myth. “It was really good to see a character with Irish roots when I was young,” says Linehan. “Usually, the only time Irish people appeared in British comics was as the butt of jokes on the letters page.”

Although Action and 2000AD started as down-the-line boys’ comics, female characters were not lacking. Alan Moore and Ian Gibson’s Halo Jones is still loved to this day, as are Dredd’s fellow Judges Hershey and Anderson. The 1987 strip Strontium Dog, about a mutant bounty hunter called Johnny Alpha, gave birth to a spin-off story featuring female bounty hunter Durham Red.

For novelist Lauren Beukes, growing up in South Africa meant US comics were in short supply because of anti-apartheid trade sanctions, but she could get hold of British titles. “2000AD featured interesting, complicated female characters and stories that dealt with moral complexities and complicities, from the atrocities of war in Bad Company and Rogue Trooper to asshole superhero rock stars in Zenith, freedom fighters in Nemesis the Warlock and the neo-apartheid world of Johnny Alpha where mutants are segregated and discriminated against. It felt real and important, subversive, surprising and entertaining as hell,” she says.

For this week’s 40th anniversary issue, Beukes and Dale Halvorsen were approached to write a Durham Red story. “It was a childhood dream unlocked for both of us,” she says, talking about their seven-page bounty-hunting heist story The Judas Strain, which refers to the Belgian king Leopold II, who plundered the Congo and killed as many as 10 million people. “Seeing how strange and fantastical stories could work as allegory for social issues and politics had a huge influence on me, and the kinds of stories I write.”

Around the time Durham Red first appeared, in 1987, 2000AD underwent one of its many behind-the-scenes changes. IPC sold off its comics division to Robert Maxwell, and it was renamed Fleetway. After Maxwell’s death in 1991, his publishing empire was broken up and Danish company Egmont bought the Fleetway stable.

Rapidly approaching the once-futuristic year of its name, things had never looked bleaker for 2000AD. “It didn’t really fit into Egmont’s publishing plan, and the feeling was that it was going to be milked for whatever it was worth and then just cancelled,” says Matt Smith, who joined the company as an assistant editor in 2000 – just as the most recent change of ownership took place. In what is widely seen as a nick-of-time rescue, games producer Rebellion bought 2000AD. In 2002, Smith was appointed the ninth editor and is currently the longest-serving incarnation of Tharg the Mighty, as well as the one to see the comic reach its milestone birthday.

“It’s a great achievement,” says Smith, “and one that is testament to the creative teams who have worked on the comic over the years.”

While many people who grew up with 2000AD have stayed with it, Smith is adamant that is should not be seen as a nostalgia title. “We have to make sure that we are still putting out stories with that same sense of irreverence and satire, but which are totally relevant today, to existing readers and new ones.”

The proliferation of digital comics, along with Rebellion mining the archives to reprint older strips, has helped to improve 2000AD’s visibility; the comic is still a fixture on newsagents’ shelves every week. “The future looks really bright. It’s amazing,” says Smith, “given that nobody thought it would still be here 40 years on.”

40 years of 2000AD: share your stories, photos and collections

Read more

Indeed, back when IPC execs were tossing around ideas for the title of the new comic, Pat Mills vividly remembers the then publisher John Sanders coming up with the futuristic name. “I said to John: ‘What happens when we reach the year 2000? What will we call it then?’” Mills laughs. “He said to me, ‘Don’t worry, Pat. If it lasts three or four years we’ll count ourselves lucky.’”